Digital content or analog content may be secured and restricted through the use of control information such as, for example, digital rights management (DRM) controls and copy control information (CCI). DRM or CCI controls accompany the content whether the content is a single content component (e.g., a video component) or a group of components (e.g., a video component, an audio component and a data component) forming a multimedia presentation.
DRM and CCI controls are often linked (e.g., via a cryptographic link, a pointer structure pointing to a program number, a watermark, etc.) to the content they control and must be protected from tampering. The control information may be protected by an applied authentication that authenticates the link between the control information and the associated content to verify that the DRM and the CCI controls have not been modified. However, processing DRM and CCI controls in a conventional software-only environment leaves the control information more vulnerable to unauthorized tampering or hacking. Furthermore, other conventional systems, which employ proprietary conditional access systems, may attempt to protect the conditional access control information in tamper resistant hardware; however, the tamper resistant hardware is segregated from the actual content processing ASIC leaving the final configuration of the content processing ASIC vulnerable to tampering by an untrusted party. In addition, conventional systems may not be able to securely modify the control information by a trusted party.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.